"Bella Bella" is a term dating from 1834, not an aboriginal self-designation. The Bella Bellas (made up of at least three subgroups: the Kokaitks, Oelitks, and Oealitks), the Haihais, and the Oowekeenos are sometimes referred to as Heiltsuks. The Heiltsuks, along with the Heislas, are today identified as Bella Bellas or northern Kwakiutls. Traditionally, these groups lived in the vicinity of Queen Charlotte Sound, north of Vancouver Island and the Kwakiutl people, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. This is a wetland, marked by inlets, islands, peninsulas, mountains, and valleys, with a relatively moderate climate. Roughly 1,700 Bella Bellas lived in their territory in 1835. In 1901 the figure had shrunk to 330, but it climbed to 1,874 in 1995. The Heiltsuks spoke Heiltsuk (Haihai and Bella Bella)-Oowekyala (Oowe-keeno), a Wakashan language. The two component languages were virtually mutually unintelligible.
Dancing or secret societies performed their ceremonies in winter. Initiation into the societies was by hereditary right. Dances—a first, or shamans', series, including a cannibal's dance; a "coming down again," or second, series, including war dances; and a dog-eating dance—were ranked according to the status of both the dance and the performers. Performances dramatized the encounter of an ancestor with a supernatural being. Wealthy, high-status people sponsored dances, feasts, and potlatches. A council of chiefs managed the winter dances.
As was generally the case along the Northwest Coast, the basic political unit was the autonomous local group or clan. Each such group was presided over by a chief. Parts of several clans often formed a village, where the highest-ranking chief had relative degrees of control over the others. For defensive purposes, some villages congregated to form loose confederations or tribes.
Distinctive crests and ranked titles identified each of the four crest groups, or clans—Raven, Eagle, Orca, and Wolf. These groups also had heads, or chiefs. Resource sites could be owned by families, local groups, or crest groups, and they could be rented out for some form of compensation.
In general, society was divided into status-ranked groups, such as chiefs, free commoners, and slaves. Some divisions also added another free group between commoners and slaves, as well as several levels of chief. Symbols of high rank included tattoos, ornamentation, and the possession of wealth and hereditary titles. Commoners had less prestigious names, held smaller feasts, and had no inherited rights to certain dances. The low-class free were orphans or the unambitious with no wealthy relatives.
Regular intermarriage occurred between the Bella Bellas and the Bella Coolas. Marriage between close cousins was condoned if it furthered one's status. The bride price was a key ingredient of a marriage; in cases of divorce it was generally refunded.
Semipermanent winter villages were composed of rectangular cedar plank houses. Features included vertical wall planks, a gabled roof and double ridgepole, carved interior posts, an adjustable central smoke hole, and mat-lined walls in sleeping areas. Summer camp houses were of similar but less elabo-
Rate construction. When they were in small or temporary camps, people made do with bark structures.
Fish, especially salmon, was the staple. Other marine foods were also important. The Bella Bellas took stranded whales only for their blubber. They ate several varieties of berries and hunted deer, wolf, bear, mountain goat, small mammals, waterfowl, and most birds (except crow and raven) and their eggs. Other than in winter, when food stores were eaten, people migrated seasonally to various resource sites. Fishing technology included stone and wood stake weirs, traps, harpoons, dip nets, and clubs. Harpoons, clubs, and bow and arrow were used for hunting sea mammals. Land animals were hunted with the help of dogs, snares, spears, and deadfalls. Digging sticks helped people gather roots. Most woodworking tools were of stone. Women made burden and storage baskets.
The Bella Bellas traded shellfish and seaweed with more inland groups (such as the Bella Coolas) for eulachon (smelt) and eulachon products. They also obtained canoes in trade, often from the north. Bentwood boxes, chests, canoes, and horn spoons and ladles were items of fine local construction. Also important were relief carved and painted ceremo-nial/religious items such as totem poles and masks. The cedar dugout, a shallow-bottom canoe used with round-tipped blades, was the primary means of transportation. The Bella Bellas and Haihais also used bark canoes for lake travel.
In warm weather, women wore cedar-bark aprons; men went naked. Blankets of woven cedar bark, mountain goat wool or dog hair, or tanned, sewn skins kept people warm in cold weather. Women wore waterproof basket caps and cedar-bark ponchos in the rain. Both sexes wore their hair long. Those who could afford it wore abalone nose and ear pendants. High-status women also wore labrets, dentalia bracelets, necklaces, and anklets. They also deformed their babies' heads for aesthetic purposes. The people painted their bodies and faces against sunburn.
The Bella Bellas fought regularly, mainly against the Bella Coolas, Haidas, Tsimshians, and Kwakiutls. They were well organized militarily. The Haihais were regularly under attack, but the Oowekeenos were more geographically isolated. Revenge, trespass, violation of custom, and seasonal shortages of food were common causes of war.
Bella Bellas probably met non-Indians for the first time in 1793, when the explorers George Vancouver and Alexander Mackenzie arrived to prospect for the fur trade. Shortly thereafter, that trade brought more Anglos as well as Anglo-Indian violence. Milbanke Sound was the first local major trade center. In 1833, the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort McLoughlin on Campbell Island as a major trading post. Although it abandoned the fort ten years later, the company opened a small store on the site about 1850. During the fur trade period, the Bella Bellas emerged as intermediaries, controlling access to some interior tribes and playing the Americans and British against each other.
An 1862 smallpox epidemic set off a period of rapid change. Dramatic Indian depopulation led to village consolidation. Missionization followed, as did the growth of the commercial fishing, canning, and logging industries. In 1880, the government separated Indians from their land by unilaterally establishing reserves. The Bella Bella Reserve was run by Methodist missionaries. Village centralization and consolidation continued. Around 1900, two Oowe-keeno villages were established near a sawmill and a cannery. The Haihais moved from their local villages in about 1870 to Swindle Island, a fuel depot for steamships.
In the twentieth century, northern Kwakiutls were largely displaced from the logging and fishing industries owing to a combination of factors, including competition with non-Natives, technological advances, and the loss of land rights. Increased unemployment and out-migration have been the results. However, ties remain strong between home communities and the people in regional cities and towns.
See also Disease, Historic and Contemporary;
Potlatch; Salmon, Economic and Spiritual
Significance of; Slavery; Trade.
"Bella Coola" is an Anglicization of a Heiltsuk word for the speakers of the Bella Coola language. The Native word for the people of the Bella Coola valley was Nuxalkmx. They consisted of four or five subgroups linked linguistically, territorially, and culturally, although not politically. These people are known today as the Nuxalt Nation.
Traditionally, several permanent villages existed south and east of the Bella Bellas and the Haislas, east of the Queen Charlotte Sound coast in British Columbia. These people may also have occupied territory east of the Coastal Range. Beginning around 1800, they consolidated their villages at the mouth of the Bella Coola River. In 1936, a flood forced them to move from the north to the south shore of the river's mouth. Their traditional territory is rugged, with mountains, estuaries, and forests. The climate is cool and wet. Perhaps 1,400 Bella Coolas lived in their villages in 1780. Speaking a Salishan language, the Bella Coolas were latecomers to the region, probably arriving around 1400.
The Bella Coolas recognized four or five worlds, including a center, or human, world. A supernatural being kept this flat center world level and balanced. There were many deities and a supreme female deity, all of whom resided in the sky. All things had spirits that could intervene in the lives of people. Favorable intervention might be gained through prayer and ritual sexual intercourse.
Their extremely rich ceremonialism was dominated by two secret societies as well as the potlatch. Membership in one such society, Sisaok, was restricted to the children and relatives of certain chiefs. An extended period of seclusion accompanied initiation, as did songs and the display of carved masks with crests. The ceremony dramatized various kin-related legends. The other society, Kusiut, was based on contact with the supernaturals. Its dances, such as cannibal, scratcher, breaker, and fungus, included songs and masks representing supernatural beings. These dances dominated the ceremonial period, which lasted from November through March.
All people had the potential to become shamans; the event occurred when a supernatural being conferred power through a visit, a name, and songs. Some such power could cure sickness. Some shamans received power through ghosts and could see dead people; they cured disease caused by ghosts.
Aboriginally, the Bella Coolas inhabited between thirty and sixty autonomous villages, each consisting of from two to thirty houses arranged in a row along a river or creek bank. Each village had a chief, whose status derived from his ancestral name, prerogatives, and wealth. Chiefs had little direct ruling power. A woman who had been "rebought" several times, and who had thus helped her husband accumulate status, was also recognized as a chief.
Descent groups probably owned fish weirs in aboriginal times. Hunting, too, could only occur in an area claimed by a descent group. Hunters, some of whose ancestral prerogatives allowed them to be known as professionals, underwent ritualistic preparation.
The units of social organization included the household, village, and descent group, or all those with a common ancestral mythology. A child could inherit both parents' descent groups, but residence with the father's family tended to reinforce the patrilineal line. Social status was important and clearly delineated. The ability (and obligation) to give away gifts on ceremonial occasions (potlatches) was a key component of social status. Social mobility was possible, and even slaves might obtain dance prerogatives and thus achieve some status.
Babies were born with the assistance of midwives in a birth hut in the woods. Their heads were flattened and their bodies massaged daily. Wealthy parents gave naming potlatches. Infanticide and abortion were occasionally practiced. The Bella Coolas pierced the nasal septa of high-status children, both boys and girls; the occasion was accompanied by potlatches. Upon reaching puberty, girls were secluded, and their activity and diet were restricted for a year. There were no boys' puberty rituals, although their first hunted game was distributed and eaten ritually, as were the first berries gathered by girls.
Although the ancestral family was an important source of Bella Coola identity, they did intermarry extensively with other peoples. Parents and elderly relatives arranged marriages, around which there were many rituals and opportunities to increase status. The relatives of high-status brides were expected to "rebuy" the woman (donate goods) every time her husband gave a potlatch. Cruelty, neglect, and infidelity were considered grounds for divorce.
Music could be both sacred and secular. The former was sung by a choir, who used sticks and drums for a beat, and three main performers. Various wind instruments were also used to symbolize the supernaturals.
Permanent houses were large, planked structures. They were constructed of red cedar and often built on stilts against floods and enemies. House-fronts were decorated with the owner's crest. Houses were inhabited by extended families. Entry was through carved house posts. Some winter houses were excavated, with only the roofs showing.
The Bella Coolas enjoyed a relatively regular food supply. Fish was the staple, including five types of salmon plus steelhead trout, rainbow and cutthroat trout, eulachon (smelt), Pacific herring, and others. All fish was boiled, roasted, or smoke-dried. Eulachon was very valuable, perhaps more for its grease than as food. The first chinook salmon and eulachon of the season were eaten ritually.
Other important foods included shellfish; seals, sea lions, and beached whales; land mammals, such as mountain goat, bear, lynx, hare, beaver, marmot, and deer; and fowl. More than 135 plants were used for foods, medicines, and raw materials. Important plant foods included berries and the cambium layer of the western hemlock (steamed with skunk cabbage leaves, pounded, dried, and mixed with eula-chon grease).
Wood carving was probably the preeminent Bella Coola art. Masks, entry poles, house frontal poles (with entry through a gaping mouth), and carved posts were often painted and decorated with crest figures. They had no fully developed totem pole. They also made pictographs and petroglyphs. The Bella Coolas used several types of canoes, including long, narrow canoes of a single red cedar log for rivers (the most common) and four types of seagoing canoes. Canoes were decorated with crest designs or painted black. Hunters also wore two types of snowshoes in winter.
The Bella Coolas engaged in irregular conflict with neighbors such as the Carriers, Chilcotins, and Kwakiutls. Their lack of political centralization made retaliating against raiding parties difficult. The Bella Coolas raided too, attacking at dawn, burning a village, killing all the men, and taking women and children as slaves. Weapons included moose-hide shields, wood armor, the bow and arrow, clubs, and spears.
In 1793 the Bella Coolas encountered the explorers George Vancouver and Alexander Mackenzie; the Indians traded fish and skins to them for iron, copper, knives, and other items. As the fur trade developed, Hudson's Bay Company maintained a local fort/post from 1833 to 1843. During this period, the Bella Coolas prevented furs from the Carrier Indians (an eastern group) from reaching the coast, thus maintaining a trade monopoly with the whites.
Shortly after gold was discovered in their area (1851), disease, alcohol, and hunger combined to weaken and kill many Indians. A severe smallpox epidemic in 1863 forced the abandonment of numerous villages. Hudson's Bay Company operated another local trading post from 1869 to 1882, and Protestant missionaries penetrated the Bella Coola territory in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1885, nine Bella Coolas journeyed to Germany for thirteen months, dancing and singing for European audiences and inspiring the anthropologist Franz Boas to begin his lifelong study of Northwest Coast Indians. A Norwegian colony, the first local non-Indian settlement, was established in the Bella Coola Valley in 1894.
These changes, combined with the gradual transition to a commercial (fishing and logging) economy and the replacement of traditional housing with single-family structures, weakened descent groups and led to the gradual consolidation of ceremonials and the abandonment of songs. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the people relearned the old songs, using recordings made by anthropologists. In the 1970s, the revival of traditional culture also included new masks and dances.
See also Disease, Historic and Contemporary; Potlatch; Salmon, Economic and Spiritual Significance of; Slavery; Trade.
See Salish, Southwestern Coast.
See Tolowa; Upper Umpqua.
"Chinook" describes one of a group of Chinookan peoples whose branches included Lower Chinookan (or Chinook proper) and Upper Chinookan. The name came from a Chehalis word for the inhabitants of a particular village site on Baker Bay. In 1780, roughly 22,000 Chinookans lived in their territory, a figure that declined to less than 100 in the late nineteenth century.
Traditionally, the Chinookan peoples lived along the Pacific Coast around the Columbia River delta and upstream on both sides for about 150 miles. Lower Chinookans included the Shoalwater Chinookans (Shoalwater or Willapa Bay and the
North bank of the Columbia from Cape Disappointment to Gray's Bay) and the Clatsops (south bank of the Columbia, from Young's Bay to Point Adams). Upper Chinookans included the Cathlamets (Grays Bay to Kalama), the Multnomahs (Kalama to about Portland and up the Columbia just past Government Island), and the Clackamas (southwest of Portland and roughly along the Willamette and Clackamas Rivers). Today, most Chinookans live in southwestern Washington and locales around the Pacific Northwest.
The Chinookan family of Penutian languages was composed of Lower Chinookan (Chinook proper) and Upper Chinookan, which included the languages of Cathlamet, Multnomah, and Kiksht. In the context of historic Northwest Coast trade, Chinook, or Oregon Trade Language (consisting of elements of Chinookan, Nootkan, French, and English) was considered a trade lingua franca from Alaska to California.
All Chinookan males and some females sought guardian spirit powers on prepubescent quests alone at night. Special songs and dances accompanied the receipt of such powers. An elaborate ceremonialism, based on the acquisition and display of spirit powers, took place during winter, the sacred period of spiritual renewal. Shamans might rent their powers to inflict harm (bodily injury or soul loss) or to cure someone. Chinookans also observed the first salmon rite (the ritualistic preparation and consumption of the season's first catch).
Aboriginally, the Chinookans lived in more than thirty villages. Each village had a hereditary chief, but, through the deployment of the proper alliances and methods, a chief could exercise his authority over a wider area. The chief arbitrated quarrels, supervised subsistence activities, and provided for his village in time of need. His privileges included taking food, goods, or women at will. The chief was assisted by an orator who spoke directly to the lower-ranked people.
Chinookan society was clearly stratified; status rankings included slave, commoner, and chief. High status went to those who had and could display wealth (food, clothing, slaves, canoes, high-ranked spouses), such as chiefs, warriors, shamans, and traders, as well as those with hereditary privileges. Slaves were bought, sold, or captured as property. Fishing areas were usually controlled by specific descent groups, although other subsistence areas were not so clearly controlled. Ties between villages were maintained by trade and alliances through wives. Imported dentalium shell was used for money and ornamentation. Later, beads from China were also highly prized.
All life cycle events, at least among high-status families as well as those of chiefly succession, were marked by wealth display, gift giving, feasting, singing, and dancing. The purpose of the potlatch, a word meaning "giving" in Chinookan, was to reaffirm the lineage system as well as individual and descent group rank and social status, by conferring legitimacy on an occasion. Chinookans observed numerous taboos around girls' puberty (including seclusion for five months) and menstruation. Nonslave infants' heads were flattened at birth for aesthetic reasons. Corpses were placed in cattail mats; burial with possessions took place in canoes. A slave was sometimes killed to serve as a servant in the afterlife. Mourners cut their hair and never again spoke the name of the dead. Lacrosse was a popular game.
Permanent winter dwellings were rectangular, gable-roofed, cedar plank houses, excavated and framed with cedar logs, with an average length of fifty feet. Decorations were of geometric, animal, and human designs. Floors were mat covered or planked, with an excavated central fireplace and a smoke hole above. Elevated bed platforms ran along the walls. Winter villages generally comprised around twenty houses. A light framework supported shelters of cattail mat sides and cedar-bark roofs at summer fishing, hunting, or root gathering camps.
Their strategic location at the mouth of the Columbia, as well as their business skills, enabled the Chinookans to dominate trade as far away as Puget Sound and areas to the west and south. The Dalles, a giant waterfall and rapids on the Columbia, was the site of a great aboriginal trade fair. Participants brought pelts, mountain sheep horn, baskets, woven rabbit skin robes (interior tribes); slaves (Klamaths and Modocs); salmon, bear grass, blubber, canoes, and berries (Chinookans); and dentalia (Nootkas). Connections to this trade fair stretched ultimately as far as the Great Plains. The existence of Chinook jargon, the regional trade language, was testament to the central role the Chinookans played in trade. Imported dentalium shells were a standard medium of exchange.
After contact, the Chinookans were involved in a triangular trade in which they traded elk hide cuirasses and other items to non-Natives, who traded them to other Native people for sea otter
Pelts, which they in turn traded in China for items such as silk and tea. Meanwhile, the Chinookans traded guns, powder, and steel tools obtained from the non-Natives to other Indians for a fabulous profit. This trade pattern greatly increased the status of Chinook women, who played a more active trading role than men. When land-based trade in items such as beaver and other furs replaced the maritime trade, women continued their dominant roles.
Although Chinookans may have spotted Spanish ships off the Columbia River delta, early Anglo explorers first encountered and spread smallpox among them in 1792. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark lived among and wrote about the Clatsops in 1805.
The fur trade began in earnest during the next decade; Astoria was founded in 1811. During the early days of the fur trade, at least, the Indians played key roles. The acquisition of goods such as musket and powder, copper and brass kettles, cloth, tobacco, and other items increased the relative prestige of downriver groups so much that they tried to monopolize trade to the exclusion of their upriver rivals. Native culture began gradually to change, owing mainly to the acquisition of manufactured items and to enduring contact between Indians and Anglos.
Shortly after the initial contacts, Indians began to experience severe population declines due to disease. Alcohol-related disease and deaths took a further toll. The Chinookans abandoned many village sites and consolidated others, particularly around trading sites. The number of potlatches may have increased during this time, as villages had to rerank themselves in the context of the new trading society. By the 1850s, most survivors were being forced, under treaties that were never ratified, to cede their land in exchange for fishing rights. Survivors drifted to area reservations (Chehalis, Siletz, Grande Ronde, Shoalwater) or remained in their homelands.
By the twentieth century, the (Lower) Chinook had so effectively merged with the Lower Chehalis and the Shoalwater Salish that their language essentially passed out of use. Other groups also lost their identities through merger and consolidation. In 1899, the Chinookans, Clatsops, Cathlamets, and Wahkiakums (Upper Chinookans) presented a land claim to the U. S. government. They were awarded $20,000 (for almost 214,000 acres) in 1912. In 1925, the tribe established a business council to pursue its elusive treaty rights. A 1931 U. S. Supreme Court case (Halbert v. U. S.) held that Chinookans and other tribes had formal rights on the Quinault Reservation. Within a few years they had become that reservation's largest landholders. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), however, blocked their bid to organize a government under the Indian Reorganization Act.
In 1951, the nonreservation Chinookans combined to form the Chinook Nation and press their land claims with the newly created (1946) Indian Claims Commission. Soon, however, and without any official action, the BIA began to treat them as a terminated tribe. In 1971, this group, reconstituted in 1953 as the Chinook Indian Tribe, Inc., received an award of almost $50,000 but no land. Their petition for federal recognition, filed in 1979, is still pending.
See also Disease, Historic and Contemporary;
Fishing Rights; Salmon, Economic and Spiritual Significance of; Slavery; Trade.
See Salish, Northern Coast.
"Coosans" describes the Coosans proper and Sius-law peoples. The word is probably southwestern Oregon Athapaskan and refers to Coos Bay and the surrounding region. "Coos" may mean "on the south," "lake," or "lagoon." "Siuslaw" comes from the Siuslaw word for their region.
The Coosans lived around Coos Bay, Oregon, roughly from Twomile Creek in the south to Ten-mile Lake in the north. Siuslawan speakers lived north of them, along the coast and inland, to about Tenmile Creek. Except for the immediate coast, much of the area is mountainous and densely forested. Today, most of these people live in and around Coos Bay in southwestern Oregon. The number of Coosans in the mideighteenth century may have approximated 4,000. This number had declined to roughly 465 by 1870. Coosans spoke two Coosan languages: Hanis and Miluk. The Sius-lawans spoke the Siuslaw language, which consisted of the dialects Siuslaw proper and Lower Umpqua (Kuitches). Both Coosan and Siuslaw were Penutian languages.
Individuals could acquire power, mostly used to ensure luck in gaining wealth, through dreams and spirit quests. Unlike more northerly tribes, few other than shamans were actively involved with the supernatural; most people were much more interested in obtaining wealth. The most common kind of shaman was rigorously trained as a curer of disease (caused either by the intrusion of a disease-causing object, often sent by a hostile shaman, or, less often, by soul loss). The second kind of shaman was more ritualistic; in addition to curing, these shamans also found thieves and promulgated evil. They were involved in the numerous life cycle taboos and especially in the elaborate girls' puberty ceremony and various other rituals of purification.
The people regularly held large-scale ceremonies featuring dancing, feasting, games, and gambling. Their mythology included stories of a primordial trickster, of legends, and of supernatural beings of forest and water. First salmon and first elk ceremonies (the ritualistic preparation and consumption of the season's first catch or kill) were also held.
The basic political unit was the winter village group, usually a group of paternally related men with their families. Each major village had a chief and often an assistant chief. An informal council of wealthy men and women advised the chief. Succession was mainly hereditary, at least among the Coosans. Women might succeed if there were no eligible males. Chiefs arbitrated quarrels, supervised communal activities, and saw that no one went hungry. Villagers contributed food to the chief's family.
Coosan and Siuslaw society consisted of four classes: chiefly and wealthy families, a socially respectable majority, poor people, and slaves (obtained by capture or trade). The classes enjoyed similar subsistence levels; their main difference lay in nonfood wealth and status. Marriage occurred when a groom's family paid a bride price, which was later returned in a lifelong cycle of mutual gift giving and responsibilities. The dead were buried; their goods were broken and placed in and around the grave.
Permanent houses ranged between twenty and fifty or more feet long and half as wide and were excavated to a depth of about three to six feet. Two or more center posts supported a single ridgepole. Rafters sloped to the ground or to side supports. Walls and gabled roofs were of lashed cedar planks. Tule mats lined the inside walls, mat partitions divided the several families within the house, and mats or hides covered the floors. Bed platforms ran along the walls. Among the Siuslaw, two or more houses were sometimes joined.
Camp houses were of thatched grass with a gabled or one-pitch roof. Two types of sweat houses existed. One doubled as a men's clubhouse and boys' dormitory. It was square, plank-walled, excavated, and covered with dirt. The other, for use by both men and women, was in a beehive shape and heated by steam.
Most clothing was made by women from skins and various fibers. Both sexes wore leggings and moccasins but usually only for travel and in cold weather. On such occasions, they also wore headbands and waterproof fur or fiber capes. Men generally wore breechclouts or shorts and often shirts and caps. Women wore shirts and skirts or one-piece dresses and woven hats. Everyone wore rain capes of cattail or shredded bark. Wealthy people were likely to decorate their clothing. Some people wore tattoos, primarily for measuring dentalia strings. The Kuitch wore large beads in their noses and flattened the heads of their infants.
The first regional contact with non-Natives occurred in 1792, when Upper Umpquas traded with U. S. and British ships. Occasional trade-based contacts through the 1830s were generally amicable, except for a Kuitch (Lower Umpqua) massacre of the Jedediah Smith party in 1828 and their attack on a Hudson's Bay Company fort in 1838.
Tensions increased with the major influx of non-Natives in the 1850s. Although only the southernmost Coosan group, the Miluks (Lower Coquilles), participated in general in the 1855-1856 Rogue River War, all the Coosans and Siuslawans also suffered. An 1855 treaty, signed by Chief Jackson and others, though never ratified, was used to dispossess the Indians of their land and move them the following year to the Lower Umpqua River. Miluks and Kuitch were taken to the Coast (later the Siletz and the Alsea) Reservation, where about half died of starvation, exposure, and disease.
During these and subsequent years, the military continued to round up groups of Indians living in remote areas. As was the case nearly everywhere, Indian agents stole mercilessly from the Indians. Indians who practiced their traditional customs were whipped at a post. Easy access to alcohol corrupted, demoralized, and sickened the people.
In 1860, both groups were forcibly marched to the Siletz Reservation, which had been created five years earlier. In 1861, people on the southern part of
Siletz, including Coos and Kuitch, were moved to or near the Yachats River on the coast, home of the Alsea Indians. They remained there until 1875, dying of illness and starvation from trying to farm in a rain forest. In 1865, a central strip was removed from the reservation and opened for white settlement. The northern part then became the Siletz Reservation (Miluks) and the southern half became the Alsea Reservation (Coosans, Kuitches, and Alseans).
In 1875, when the Alsea Reservation was made available for non-Indian settlement, many people refused to go to Siletz. Some joined the Siuslawans while others filtered back to their original homelands and received eighty-acre homesteads from the government in 1876. As their culture and language languished, tribal members worked as loggers, laborers, clam diggers, and cranberry harvesters. Women specialized in making baskets and cattail fiber mats.
Coosans who did live at Siletz worked at subsistence activities around the turn of the century. Indian loggers cut trees that stood on their former, plundered reservation. Siletz Indians won several small land claims judgments in the 1930s and 1950s. However, the tribe and reservation were "terminated" in the mid-1950s, with devastating result. They were restored in 1977 and given a 3,630-acre reservation three years later.
The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Suislaw organized formally in 1916. They have spent the rest of the century petitioning the government for compensation for their aboriginal lands, in vain to date. The Coos obtained a 6.1-acre "reservation" at Coos Bay in 1940. They were involuntarily terminated in 1954 and restored thirty years later.
The Dream Dance, a local variation of the Ghost Dance, was popular in the 1870s. By the twentieth century, most Native languages were no longer spoken. In 1917, Coosans and Siuslawans created the Coos-Lower Umpqua-Siuslaw Tribal Government. A schism in the Coos tribe occurred in 1951 after a court ruled that some Miluks were eligible to share in money awarded in a land claims suit to the (upper) Coquille (Mishikhwutmetunne) Indians. These Miluks then became affiliated with the Coquille Indian tribe.
See also Fishing Rights; Ghost Dance Religion;
Potlatch; Salmon, Economic and Spiritual
Significance of; Slavery; Trade.
See Coosans; Upper Umpqua.
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
See Upper Umpqua.
See Salish, Central Coast.
See Salish, Southwestern Coast.
See Salish, Southern Coast.
Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of
See Upper Umpqua.
"Haida" is an adaptation of their self-designation. In the late eighteenth century, Haidas lived in a number of towns, politically unorganized but distinguishable as six groups by geography, tradition, and speech. These groups included the Kaigani people, the people of the north coast of Graham island, the Skidegate Inlet people, the people of the west coast of Moresby Island, the people of the east coast of Moresby Island, and the southern (Kunghit) people. The west coast Pitch-town people stood outside this classification system.
Haida territory included the Queen Charlotte Islands and Alexander Archipelago of British Columbia. This is a region of considerable environmental variation, including coastal lowlands, plateau, and mountains. The area is fairly wet, especially
Young Haida dancer Donny Edenshaw dances while Guugaaw Edenshaw, a family memher, drums out a rhythm on a beach at Musset in the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1985. (Dewitt Jones/Corhis)
In the west. The Haida population was roughly
9.000 to 10,000 in the late eighteenth century. This number dropped by almost 95 percent, to about 550, in 1915. Haidas spoke various dialects, including Skidegate and Masset, of the Haida Athapaskan language. Haida country was settled more than
9.000 years ago.
Haidas believed that animals possessed intelligence and humanlike souls, had a hierarchical ranking, lived in villages, and could change their forms at will. Haidas offered prayers, grease, tobacco, and flicker feathers to the spirits of game animals. They also conceived of three worlds: sky, sea, and land. Their ceremonies were directly related to the system of social stratification. Potlatches, feasts, and dance performances, given by high-ranking people, were the main ceremonial events. Shamans, with multiple supernatural powers, were considered to be more powerful than chiefs.
People lived in autonomous villages, some consisting of a single lineage. The basic social and political unit was the lineage, or clan; each contained up to twelve households and was presided over by a hereditary chief. He gave permission for others to access the lineage's subsistence area and could declare war. Household chiefs (owners of plank houses) exercised control over their households, deciding when members left for fishing or hunting camps. In multilineage towns, the wealthiest, highest-ranking house chief was the town master, or town mother.
The Haidas divided most labor along sex and class lines. Women gathered, processed, and preserved all foods; prepared animal skins; and made clothing and baskets. Men fished, hunted, built houses and canoes, carved, and painted. Canoe making and carving, as well as sea otter hunting, were high-prestige occupations. Economically important slaves, captured during war, did much of the fishing.
Ambition, success in hunting and fishing, and industry were highly valued qualities. Haida society was divided into two matrilineal divisions: Raven and Eagle, each composed of lineages, or clans. Lin-
Eages had mythological origins and controlled property such as subsistence areas and names, dances, songs, and crest figures. Crests were the identifying symbols of lineages and an indication of personal rank within the lineage. They were carved on totem poles and other wooden items and tattooed on the body.
At feasts and potlatches, guests were seated according to their rank. Feasts, although always part of potlatches, were also held separately to name a child, at a marriage or death, to honor a visitor, or to enhance prestige. In addition to personal rank, there was a class system. Upper-class people bore many potlatch names, because when they were children their parents had given potlatches in their honor; they owned houses and were heirs to high-ranking names and chieftainships.
The Haidas observed a number of life cycle rituals and taboos. Children were regarded as reincarnated ancestors. Uncles toughened boys by, for example, making them take winter sea swims. There was no boys' puberty ceremony, but girls were secluded for a month or longer and followed many behavioral restrictions. Marriages were arranged in childhood or infancy. Property exchange and gift giving marked the marriage. Death among high-status people was a major ceremonial occasion. After bodies were washed, costumed, and painted, they lay in state for several days. Then they were placed in bent-corner coffins constructed by men of the father's lineage and removed through a hole in the wall. Burial was either in a lineage grave or in a mortuary column, followed by a potlatch and the raising of a memorial pole. Commoners had no poles erected in their honor. Slaves were thrown into the sea.
The Haidas were a seafaring people. Fishing technology included hook and line (of gut), traps, and harpoons. Hunting equipment included snares, bows and arrows, and clubs. Women made twined basketry (for quivers and other items) of split spruce roots and cedar-bark mats and bags. Building tools included wooden wedges, stone adzes, and basalt or jade hammers. Dugout cedar canoes were up to seventy feet long and eight feet wide, carved and painted. The Haidas had a fire bow drill and began working their own iron in the late eighteenth century.
At least in the early historic period, the Haidas gained wealth from their skill as traders. They traded canoes, slaves, and shell to the Tlingits for copper, Chilkat blankets, and moose and caribou hides. Canoes, seaweed, chewing tobacco, and dried halibut went to the Tsimshians for eulachon (smelt) grease, dried eulachons, and soapberries. They acquired slaves from the Kwakiutls. There was some intravillage trade. In the mid-1830s they traded furs, dried halibut, potatoes, and dried herring spawn to the Hudson's Bay Company for blankets, rice, flour, and other staples.
The Haida were outstanding wood-carvers. Their masterpieces included canoes, totem (mortuary) poles, house fronts, walls, screens, weapons, bentwood boxes, ceremonial masks, tools, and implements. Totem pole carving burgeoned during the nineteenth century with the acquisition of metal tools; the Haidas built some of the best such poles in world history. Designs included zoomorphic crest figures as well as mythological beings and events. Black, red, and blue-green were traditional colors. Other arts included basketry, especially hats, and other excellent woven items, such as robes, capes, and blankets. They may have carved argillite in prehistoric times, but certainly for the curio trade from the nineteenth century on, at which time they also took up silver engraving.
The Natives first saw a non-Indian when the Spanish explorer Juan Perez Hernandez arrived in 1774. Numerous trading ships followed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Haidas traded sea otter pelts for European and U. S. manufactured goods. They also began cultivating potatoes at this time. By the late eighteenth century, the Haidas were rich and powerful.
Early trade was generally peaceful except for some hostilities in 1791, the probable year they first contracted smallpox. Their sea otter trade ended about 1830. It was replaced by land-based fur operations and the Hudson's Bay Company, whose 1830s post at Fort Simpson (coast Tsimshian country) became the central trading location for Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian traders for the next forty years. The Haidas also traded in Victoria beginning in 1858, drawn by the local gold rush. During this period, however, they fought with rival Kwakiutls and fell victim to drinking and prostitution. More disease, especially smallpox, hit hard in 1862 and led to widespread village abandonment and consolidation. By the mid-1870s, Haida culture was in full collapse.
Christian (Methodist) missionaries arrived in Haida country in 1829. The Anglican Church was active at Masset from the early 1880s; shortly thereafter the Haidas ceased erecting grave posts and
Memorial totem poles. Dancing and the power of shamans also declined. In 1883, Haida villages were divided between Methodists (central and southern) and Anglican (northern) missionaries.
Under government auspices, the Presbyterian Church established Hydaburg, Alaska, around the turn of the century. It was meant to facilitate the transition among Haidas from its traditional to the dominant culture. In 1936, the Haida became the first Indian group in Alaska to adopt a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act. They succeeded in obtaining a large reservation in 1949, but, under pressure from the salmon industry, a judge invalidated the reservation several years later.
The Haidas in Canada were granted almost 3,500 acres of land in 1882 and another 360 in 1913. By the twentieth century, Haidas were migrating seasonally to work in the commercial mining, fishing, and canning industries. Acculturation proceeded rapidly. The potlatch was outlawed in 1884, although many Indians continued clandestinely to observe this central aspect of their culture. Government land allotments, without regard to traditional lineages, undercut the latter's power, as did the growth of single-family housing.
Canada passed its first comprehensive Indian Act in 1884. Among other things, the Act established numerous small reserves for Indian subsistence and other activities. In 1912, Presbyterian Tlingits formed the Alaska Native Brotherhood (the Alaska Native Sisterhood was founded eleven years later), which worked for the abandonment of tradition, the mitigation of racial prejudice, increased educational opportunities, and land rights. These organizations reversed their stand against traditional practices in the late 1960s. Severe overt economic and social discrimination against Indians continued, however, including a virtual apartheid system during the first half of the twentieth century.
After World War II, Masset experienced a brief boom in carpentry and boatbuilding. Most villagers in the 1960s worked in the canning and processing industries for half the year and were otherwise unemployed. In general, Alaska Indians campaigned for self-government and full citizenship. Canadian Indian policy favored integration into mainstream society after World War II. In the 1960s, the government granted Indians a measure of selfdetermination, which sparked a period of cultural renewal. Tlingits and Haidas received a $7.5 million land claims settlement in 1970. Under the terms of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), the
Haidas set up several corporations, although one, the Haida Corporation, declared bankruptcy in 1986.
See also Salmon, Economic and Spiritual
Significance of; Slavery; Totem Poles; Trade.
See Bella Bella.
See Quileute.
See Salish, Southern Coast.
See Salish, Central Coast.
See Coosans.
"Kwakiutl" was originally the name of a local group and may mean "beach on the other side of the water." Once consisting of roughly thirty autonomous tribes or groups, the Kwakiutls did not think of themselves as a people until about 1900. They are sometimes referred to as Kwakwaka'wakw ("Kwaki-utl-Speaking People") or Kwakwala ("Kwakiutl language"). Many Kwakiutls continue to live in or near their aboriginal territory, which is located around the Queen Charlotte Strait on the central coast of British Columbia. The Kwakiutl population in the early nineteenth century was about 8,000. Kwakiutl is a member of the northern (Kwakiutlan) branch of the Wakashan language family. The three related languages were Haisla, Heiltsuk-Oowekyala, and Kwakiutl proper.
The area around the Queen Charlotte Strait has probably been occupied for 10,000 years or longer. During the last 5,000 years, two distinct cultures arose. One was based on a simple obsidian technology and featured a broad-based subsistence economy. People of the second, or Queen Charlotte Strait culture (post-500 BCE), used bone and shell technology and ate mostly salmon, seal, and other marine foods.
Spanish, British, and U. S. explorers arrived in the Kwakiutl homeland during the late eighteenth century. By early in the next century the local sea otter trade was in full swing. The Hudson's Bay Company became active when the sea otter trade diminished, around the 1830s. At that time the Kwakiutls began serving as intermediaries in the fur trade. They and many other Indian peoples were frequent visitors to the company's post at Fort Victoria.
Changes in Kwakiutl culture during the fur trade period included the substitution of iron and steel for Native materials in tools, as well as Hudson's Bay blankets for the older style of robes. Disease epidemics leading to depopulation also took a heavy toll at that time. In the 1850s, several Kwakiutl villages consolidated around a Hudson's Bay Company coal mine at Fort Rupert; this was the genesis of the Kwakiutl tribe. In general, the 1850s and 1860s were terrible years for the Kwakiutls, marked by the destruction of several villages by the British Navy and Bella Coola raiders as well as smallpox epidemics. In the late 1880s, Canada established reserves for some Kwakiutl bands while claiming much of their aboriginal territory.
Aboriginally, trade partners were also often raiding targets. The enforced cessation of intertribal hostilities about 1865 precipitated an explosion of potlatching activity, as all Kwakiutl tribes became part of the system of social alliances and tribal ranking. The potlatch flourished despite legislation outlawing it in 1885 and 1915, as did traditional artistic expression.
Acculturation was proceeding rapidly by the 1880s. The Kwakiutl were giving up their traditional dress, subsistence activities, and many customs and were entering the local wage economy. Around 1900, Alert Bay, the site of a cannery, a school, and a sawmill, superseded Fort Rupert as the center of Kwakiutl life. The early twentieth century was a period of economic boom for Kwakiutls owing to the growth of the commercial fishing and canning industries. Another boom in the fishing industry occurred after World War II. Many people abandoned the potlatch and traditional culture during the Depression and converted to the Pentecostal Church. Potlatching was not significantly reestablished until the 1970s.
In traditional Kwakiutl belief, everything had a supernatural aspect that commanded respect from people in the form of individual daily prayer and thanks. Guardian spirits, which provided luck and certain skills, might be obtained through prayer or fasting. Associated with each spirit was a secret ceremonial society, such as Cannibal, Grizzly Bear, and Warrior, as well as specific dances and ceremonies.
Shamans formed an alliance with a supernatural helper and were initiated into their craft by other shamans. The Kwakiutls recognized several degrees of shamanic power, the highest being the ability to cure and cause disease; these most powerful people were usually attached to chiefs. Shamans used songs, rattles, and purification rings (hemlock or cedar) in public curing ceremonies. Witches could harm or otherwise control people without recourse to supernatural power, although knowledge similar to theirs was available to guard against such practices.
The winter ceremonials were based on complex mythological themes and involved representations of supernatural beings and stories of ancestral contact with them. The principal winter ceremonies, including the Cedar Bark Dance and the Weasel Dance, involved feasting, potlatching, entertainment, and theater. Winter was considered a sacred season because the supernaturals were said to be present at that time. People attempted to be on better behavior and even took on sacred names.
Each of the roughly thirty autonomous tribes (local groups) had its own hereditary chief, subsistence area, winter village, and seasonal sites. Tribes consisted of between one and seven (usually at least three) kin groups (numayms), each having perhaps seventy-five to 100 people aboriginally and roughly ten to fifteen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In early historic times, some tribes formed joint winter villages without losing their individual identities.
Kin groups (tribes) owned resource areas, myths, crests, ceremonies, songs, dances, house names, named potlatching positions, and some inheritable guardian spirits. Crests, privileges, and rights were transmitted through marriage. The Kwakiutls recognized many forms of permissible marriages. Preserving the existence of crests and privileges remained all-important, and rules were
Bent or broken over time to accommodate this need. There were four traditional classes or status groups: chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves. Society became much more equal in the midnineteenth century: As the population declined, the number of privileged positions remained constant, so that more people could rise to such positions.
Potlatches, once modest affairs, became highly complex, elaborate, and more culturally central in the late nineteenth century, helping to integrate and drive Kwakiutl society by validating social status and reciprocities. The size of a potlatch varied according to the event being marked: Life cycle events for high-status children and wiping out casual mistakes received small potlatches; the receipt of a first potlatch position, dancing the winter ceremonial, and the occasion of girls' puberty received moderately sized potlatches; and the assumption of a chiefly name and/or position within a kin group, a grease feast, the buying and selling of coppers, the erection of crest memorial poles, and marriage received the largest potlatches. All included feasting, socializing, speeches, songs, displays of wealth and crests, and dances. Such pot-latches were occasionally given on credit; that is, borrowed goods (such as blankets) were usually lent at 100 percent interest.
Traditionally, the Kwakiutls practiced blood revenge, in which one or more people might be killed upon the death of a close relative. Corpses were buried in trees, caves, or canoes (chiefs), although northern groups cremated their dead.
Rows of cedar beam and plank houses with shed roofs faced the sea in traditional villages. The central house posts were carved and painted with crests. A sleeping platform extended around walls. Four families of the same kin group occupied most houses, each in a corner with its own fireplace. Private areas were partitioned off. Each village also had one or more ceremonial houses, similarly constructed. By the late nineteenth century, houses were built with milled lumber and gabled roofs.
The Kwakiutls were artists. Even in utilitarian items, visual art was joined with rhetoric, mythology, and performance art to glorify the kin groups. Wooden objects, such as massive house posts, totem and commemorative poles (nonaboriginal), masks, rattles, feast dishes, and other objects used for crest displays were carved and/or painted. The point of most Kwakiutl art was social—to display ancestral rights—rather than specifically religious, although the two are basically inseparable.
Their basic colors were black and red. The Kwakiutls experienced a golden age of art from about 1890 to 1920. They also produced some excellent twined, spruce root, and cedar-bark hats.
See also Fur Trade; Hudson's Bay Company;
Slavery; Totem Poles; Trade.
See Coosans.
See Salish, Central Coast.
"Makah" is a Klallam word for "the People." The Makah word for themselves is Kwe-net-che-chat, "People of the Point." They were a whaling people, culturally similar to the Nootkans of Vancouver Island. People have lived around Cape Flattery for roughly 4,000 years. The Makahs emigrated from Vancouver Island about 500 years ago, although some Makah villages were occupied as early as 1500 BCE. The Makahs lived around Cape Flattery on the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, a region of fierce, rainy winters and calm, sunny summers. The Makah Reservation is in Clallam County, Washington, within their aboriginal lands. The Makah population was roughly 2,000 in the late eighteenth century. Makah is a southern or Nootkan language of the Wakashan language family.
The acquisition of guardian spirits was central to Makah religion and ceremonialism. Adolescent boys acquired them by fasting in remote places. Shamans, both male and female, who had acquired several guardian spirits cured people and provided ceremonial leadership. Except for ritual hunting preparations, most ceremonies took place in the winter. Carved wooden masks figured prominently in a four-day Wolf ritual, during which members were initiated into the secret Klukwalle Society. A healing ceremony and complex whaling rituals follow Nootka patterns.
The Makahs lived in five permanent, semiautonomous villages, with one or more lesser satellite
Villages in the same general area. Social groups included headmen, commoners, and slaves. The headmen regularly affirmed their rank through the institution of the potlatch. Commoners could advance or fall back slightly through marriage or by acquiring privileges. Alliances were formed, and privileges and subsistence areas were inherited through ranked patrilineal lineages. Whaling and fur seal hunting were particularly prestigious occupations. Only the former was an inherited privilege, but both involved substantial ritual components. Aboriginally, only men hunted and fished; women gathered shellfish and plants and cleaned, cooked, and otherwise prepared food products.
Permanent houses were built on wooden frames as large as sixty by thirty by fifteen feet high. Platforms along the wall served as sleeping and storage areas. Planks from nearly flat roofs, on which fish drying racks were located, could be easily removed for ventilation. Several families lived in one house. Privacy was provided by removable partitions. House fronts and posts were carved or painted. In summer, some people left the permanent villages for summertime residences.
The region supported abundant land and sea life, including mammals, fish and shellfish, birds, and flora. Sea mammals were the most important staple, followed by fish, particularly halibut. Oil, especially from whales and fur seals, was used to flavor dried foods. The Makahs ate some land mammals. Plant foods included several varieties of berries, roots (especially sand verbena, surf grass, and buttercup), and greens. Plants were also used as medicine, for raw materials, and in entertainment.
Makah women wove spun dog wool or bird skin and fiber cordage on a two-bar loom. Women also made baskets of cedar as well as of cattail, tule, and cherry bark. Whaling equipment included mussel shell-tipped harpoons, line made of whale sinew and pounded cedar boughs, and skin floats for floating the dead whales and towing them ashore. Fishing equipment included hooks and kelp lines, weirs, traps, and gaffs. Land mammals provided additional raw material, such as antler and bone, for manufactured items. Shell was used for cutting and eating tools and for adornment. Mats for canoe sails, blankets, and cargo wrap were made from cedar bark. Wooden implements, such as bent-corner boxes (steamed and bent), bowls, dishes, containers, clubs, harpoon and arrow shafts, and bows, were fashioned from yew, red cedar, spruce, alder, and hemlock.
World History
